I’m almost certain the rumours about Pantami being placed on a US terror related watch list, is fake news. No evidence whatsoever provided but a print from a local newspaper, no other traces anywhere.

The YouTube link used as evidence to showcase Pantami’s relationship to Mohammed Yusuf was a debate of a confrontation against Yusuf’s fundamentalism not agreement on ideology. It’s not the dirt non-Hausa speakers think it is.

The Salafist movement in Nigeria used to be a tightly knit web of scholars and students that were very familiar with each other, as they navigated their more recent founded Salafism away from the predominant Sufism. Their familiarity isn’t evidence of Pantami’s extremism.

If there’s dirt to be found, one may look farther back to his University days where religious violence was the order of the day.